I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jakob Marovt of Psykopaint!

In case you don’t know what Psykopaint is, read on as Jakob explains what this cool online painting app is all about, and what they have to offer for digital painters.

What is Psykopaint?

Psykopaint is a new kind of online painting application which enables anyone to create great looking digital paintings from photos. Our main goal is to lower the barrier to creativity . Thus we see many different people coming on board: teenagers, people with mental disabilities, older people, etc.

They all found a common point in enjoying themselves in the process of photo painting, sharing ideas on what to do next and comment on each others latest creations, no matter the skill. It's become a really positive, encouraging community and we've just started to lay down the foundations for what it is to become.

How does Psykopaint work?

Unlike normal painting or photo editing applications, Psykopaint samples the colors from the underlying photo, so that painters can focus on playing with different kinds of brushes. There is also a normal painting option of canvas painting, which is mainly used by some of our more experienced users.

Painters can choose between 7 main brushes, but underneath there are more than 60 different styles and detailed options for each one of them. This way people who know what they are doing can delve really deep into it, but we don't scare off the novice users, who just want to enjoy themselves. You know: "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible," as Alan Kay once said.

How did you come up with the idea for Psykopaint?

This is actually one of those projects that start out of someone's personal passion or problems. Quite a while back (it's around 2 years or so from now), we were experimenting with digital art techniques in our spare time and developed some really simple tools for image manipulation.

There are still some footprints of those early days on the internet; hop on to the personal blogs of Mathieu Gosselin, one of the creators of Psykopaint and take a glimpse into his early experiments here. But while doing this, he has gathered a small following of people who begged him to develop these kind of tools for the rest of us. And he did - what started as a personal project is slowly starting to develop into something quite bigger with somewhere north of 250,000 photo painters now participating in our community.

What does Psykopaint have to offer for digital artists?

Some of our more experienced users really enjoy the ability to be able to paint with their beloved Wacom tablets and use a dedicated desktop app. Because some have professional needs to export their work in high resolution, we support paintings up to 4000*4000px. And as mentioned before, the under-laying possibilities of different brush styles are immense, so developed artists can really take advantage of the tool. To see some of those painters, check our blog posts featuring some of our members: Psykopaint Featured Users

Moreover, there is some controversy currently around ownership of images and works on certain web properties (remember the Pinterest problems). Psykopaint does not take ownership of anything created on the site and strongly encourages people to start painting from their original images or get free images from several sources around the internet. We actually wrote about some of those in one of our recent blog posts: 14 Great Free Photo Sites

What added features are you planning for the future?

Currently we are focusing on making the experience as easy and pleasant as possible for the painters. But the most exciting thing? We strongly believe tablets (like iPad and upcoming Windows 8) were built for applications like Psykopaint - it turns out that the special direct touch feeling takes the painting experience to a whole new level. So we are developing new tablet applications which are coming out in the upcoming months and are going to be neatly integrated with our existing web community.

By the way: Psykopaint is free to start painting and it even doesn't require a sign-up to start playing around.